


The Boy Next Door

by LavenderProse



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Coming of Age, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Minor Character Death, Slow Build, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 20:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2123553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LavenderProse/pseuds/LavenderProse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The spring after his mother dies, Eren is ten and his father decides to plant zucchinis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boy Next Door

When Eren is nine, there is an earthquake and his mother dies. He and his father move to another state. One that's not as prone to Earthquakes, one that doesn't have memories of his mother, one that isn't California. His father decides to be near family, and to Seattle they go.

Later that same year, his father's brother and his wife die in a home invasion gone wrong. The only person left alive is their eight-year-old daughter. She survives the situation by stabbing the man who murdered her parents with a pair of safety scissors. Eren gains a sister, they move again.

* * *

When Eren turns ten, they have just finished moving into a large Victorian style house in Vermont. It has a wrap-around porch and an apple tree in the back yard. Next door lives a family with a boy his age and a mother who Eren can hear yelling from inside the house when he stands on the porch. He doesn't understand the language she yells in. It isn't the one he speaks, or the one he learned from his mother, or even the one his father used to only speak in to his brother.

There is an empty flowerbed along their side of the driveway to the house next door. His father decides to plant zucchini there in the spring. Eren watches him with lazy interest over the railing of the porch. Mikasa stands next to him, stares between the slates. When he finishes, there are a dozen mounds of dirt in the garden, and his father's hands have been turned a black-brown color by the dirt. He looks up at Mikasa and Eren, smiles in that way he does when he wants to show that nothing is wrong, and says, "We'll have zucchini this summer. Do you like zucchini, Mikasa?"

She stares at him for several long moments. Eren thinks she isn't going to reply—she doesn't talk much. She does speak, though only to say, "I don't know," and pull her scarf up over her mouth, until it nestles beneath her nose. The scarf used to be Eren's, but became hers after he offered it to her after her parents' funeral. It was December and she was cold and sad. She's barely taken it off since.

The zucchinis grow 'like weeds,' his father says, but Eren is confused because he watches his father pull out tall, thin blades of green plants around the zucchinis and he calls those weeds, too. By midsummer, there are so many zucchinis on their dining room table that they can hardly use it for its designated purpose anymore. His father takes them to neighbors, sells them to the farmer's market in town, and is in constant search of zucchini recipes.

Eren goes with his father the day that he decides to go next door and offer the yelling woman and her narrow-faced son several of the smaller, sweeter zucchinis. Eren's father explains that he smaller ones are the higher quality ones, not the bigger ones, but Eren isn't sure how that works. He and his father stand on the porch next door for two minutes before someone answers. It's the boy. His upturned nose and thin eyes make it look like he's constantly smelling something bad. He cranes his neck back to stare at Eren's tall father, and doesn't speak.

"Hi there," Eren's father says. "Is your mom home?"

The boy gives a jerky nod, turns his head and shrieks, " _MAMAN_ ," into the house. Eren jumps. Then he turns around and says, "She's coming." His words are accented in a way that Eren's are not.

The boy's mother turns out to be quite a beautiful woman; tall, dark hair, round hips. Jean presses his face against her side and she rests her hand on the back of his head. She greets Eren's father with a polite smile, and when she sees the zucchini in his arms, says, "Oh,  _courgettes_. Are they for me?  _Merci_. Thank you, Grisha."

"Actually, they're zucchinis," Eren pipes up.

The adults chuckle at him, but the boy scowls from behind his mother's back and snaps, "They're called  _courgettes_  in  _French_ , stupid."

"You're stupid!"

"Eren!" his father gasps in surprise, while the woman does the same for her son—in his case, a snap of, "Jean Kirstein!"—and Eren ignores him in favor of scowling deeply at the other boy, whose pinched face becomes ruddy as he becomes angrier. Eren is sure that he's the ugliest thing he's ever seen.

"I'm sorry about this, Madeline," his father says, grabbing him by the hood of his jacket and yanking him away. "He's not usually so…confrontational." He hands off the four zucchinis in his arms to her, and drags Eren off the porch by the scruff of his neck. Eren, hands balled into fists, stomps after him.

"He started it!" Eren yells when his father has closed the door, and they're standing in the middle of their scantily furnished living room. Mikasa twitches from the sofa, where she's curled upon the sofa reading a book. She looks up and her eyes widen in reaction to Eren's outrage. He's found that she has a highly overdeveloped sense of doom.

"I know," his father sighs. He pats Eren's head. "But you need to learn to pick your fights, Eren. If you don't, life won't be very easy for you. I want you to go up to your room, okay? I'll call you down when dinner is ready."

Eren, utterly incensed by what he perceives as complete injustice, stomps all the way to his room and slams the door. Later in life, he'll realize how much every single footfall must have injured his father, but at ten years old he has no capacity for the kind of empathy it would have required. When he gets up to his room, he looks through his window and meets Jean's eyes in the room directly across from his. They scowl at each other. Eren closes his blinds.

* * *

At eleven, Eren starts middle school and gets put into the same block schedule as Jean. They spend seven hours a day, plus lunch, in the same rooms. Nobody is quite sure how they survive past sixth grade, but by the end of it all, a note is put in both of their permanent records that under no circumstances are they to be put in the same classes again.

Mikasa skips fifth grade and is in the same class with him. She's a welcome, if slightly overbearing, presence, and is probably the entire reason neither Eren or Jean gets expelled.

* * *

The summer after Eren turns twelve, he's weeding his father's zucchini, kneeling on the hot cement of the Kirsteins' driveway, and he hears Mrs. Kirstein yelling in French. The only words he understands are Jean's name and  _sortez! Sortez!_  Get out, get out. He's heard the word enough over the last two years to have looked it up, and then try to pretend he doesn't know what it means when he hears it.

Obeying orders, Jean crashes onto the porch of his house, stomps down the steps, and stands at the end of the driveway, staring up it at Eren. The driveway is long and steep, and something about the way that Jean just continues staring at him makes him nervous. He's relatively sure that Jean isn't going to be physically confrontational simply because he's sitting on the edge of his driveway, but all the same Jean's figure silhouetted by the setting sun is just somewhat imposing.

Eventually he does ascend the driveway, and stands about a foot away. Eren can see his bare feet out of the corner of his eye. Something smashes inside the house. It sounds like Jean's mother has thrown a piece of china against the wall. Eren flinches; Jean doesn't.

"She gets like this sometimes," Jean says, and there is nothing in his voice to indicate why he is explaining himself, but Eren feels as though it may have something to do with embarrassment. "Ever since my dad died, she has bad spells. It's not her fault."

"No, I get that," Eren says, because his dad does the same thing, albeit in a less violent manner. There are entire weeks when he wakes up, goes to work and comes back, and does nothing in between but sit at the kitchen table and stare at the wall. For some reason, though, he feels compelled to clear his throat and mumble, "She doesn't…hit  _you_ , right?"

The sound of rustling fabric. Eren thinks Jean is shaking his head, but doesn't look away from one specific zucchini for long enough to ascertain that assumption. Jean says, "No. Nothing like that. It's just…she gets…sometimes you just have to throw things, and…she kicks me out because she  _doesn't_  want to hit me." His voice has a weird, almost metallic echo to it in the space between the two houses. Like he's speaking into an enormous tin can.

"I see," Eren says, clears his throat and sits back on his heels, wipes his hands over his knees and leaves four finger-shaped streaks of dusty brown down the thigh of each leg. It's terribly awkward but he has no real way of resolving that issue without standing up and walking back into his house, but he doesn't think the situation allows for that. Jean is vulnerable. It would feel like striking him when he's down.

"What are you doing?" Jean asks, in what must be a desperate move for a conversational topic.

"Um…weeding," Eren says slowly.

"Oh," Jean says, and there is more silence. They both shift uncomfortably, and Eren know that Jean wishes just as much as he does that the conversation could be dropped, but both of them are involved now, and it's a kind of I-Jump-You-Jump situation. Either both of them leaves, or both of them stays. And because it would be a bad idea for Jean to return to his house at this point, they both stay.

After several minutes, Eren looks up at Jean, finally. Puberty has hit him something awful; acne up and down his face and chest. Eren hasn't had any as of yet, although he's beginning to experience some pain in his joints from what his father tells him are growth spurts, so it can't be that far off. He's always been told that the earlier puberty hits you, the less time you have to go through it. His father has told him horror stories of boys who started at fifteen and continued experiencing chronic acne and squeaking voices well into their twenties. Eren figures Jean will probably be done in a year, maybe two, and the acne will go away and he might look halfway decent, if his jaw continues squaring up and he keeps dropping baby fat left, right and center.

"Do you want to…talk about it?" Eren ventures cautiously. He's never really done this sort of thing before, at least not with anyone that isn't Mikasa, but he figures he's as good an ear for Jean as anyone. They normally hate each other, but for some reason it feels different right now.

Jean scratches the back of his neck. "Not really. Let's just…" he wanders over to the side of his own house, sits down and presses his back against the limestone foundation. "I'll sit here and you'll sit there, and we'll keep each other company but not talk. Alright?"

"Okay," Eren says, and goes back to weeding. He glances over his shoulder from time to time, to check and see if Jean is still there. He is, and he scoots up the driveway parallel to Eren when he moves to the next plant. The neighborhood is in complete darkness when Eren finishes, only managing to fulfill his task by the light of the full moon. He can hear a noise coming from the window above Jean's head, and when he glances over his shoulder in inquiry, Jean holds a finger to his lips.

"Sounds like she's asleep," Jean whispers. It carries with the same strange metallic echo, but only just far enough to reach Eren's ears. "She must have taken a pill. I'm going to go inside now."

"Kay," Eren whispers back, and watches Jean retreat to the side door. He opens and closes it very slowly, locks it and leaves the inside door ajar, presumably to encourage a breeze through the house. This is one of the safest neighborhoods in the country, and Eren knows that because it's why his father moved them here, so he doesn't worry. He rises off the ground, picks up his father's pruning sheers, and goes inside.

* * *

Eren is thirteen when he and Mikasa meet Armin Arlert, a boy who transfers into their eighth grade class about three months into the year. He is girlish in appearance and becomes an almost immediate target for bullies. The first time Eren and Mikasa witness this, Armin miserably informs them that bullies are the reason he transferred from his last school; that if it continues like this, his mother is going to have no choice but to quit her job and home school him.

They take to Armin like a duck to water, stick to him like glue. Armin does not go anywhere without Eren attached to one hip and Mikasa to the other. This is made indefinitely easier by the fact that Armin and his parents have moved into the house right on the other side of Jean's. Quickly, the bullies begin to leave Armin alone.

By the end of the school year, Eren is fourteen and the three of them are almost never seen apart. Most often, they hang out by the porch swing, on the same side of the wraparound porch as the zucchinis and the Kirstein's driveway. Eren balances precariously on the railing and Armin and Mikasa share the swing. Jean joins them one or twice, not without chagrin on Eren's part, but he's always on his best behavior so Armin doesn't really understand why he and Eren hate each other so much.

"They don't actually hate each other," Mikasa says, "they just pretend to."

"Hey! You don't know what you're talking about," Eren snaps, and Mikasa scowls. He eases back on the defense. To Armin, he says, "You'd have to have been there."

"Eren and Jean had a spat when we first moved in and, in a demonstration of supreme childishness that has followed them into adolescence, have never forgiven each other." Eren scowls at her now, but Mikasa isn't so easy to dissuade. She frown right back and continues, "Do you even remember what the fight was about?"

"Yes!"

"What?"

"…Zucchini…" Eren mumbles after a moment.

Mikasa looks at Armin, gestures at Eren in a sort of  _You see?_  movement, and gets up when their father calls to her through the kitchen window, asking she come in and help him cook dinner. Eren and Armin watch her go, and then Eren gets off the railing and falls back into the swing. He and Armin sway wildly back and forth, and Armin lifts his legs onto the seat, crosses them at the ankle.

Eren glances up, sees Jean's figure leaning out his bedroom window, and calls, "I see you, Kirstein! You eavesdropping?"

Jean grins at him from the window. Eren looks away, aggressively stares at the porch floor, and tries not to smirk. Fails.

* * *

Armin, Mikasa and Eren go into their first year of high school metaphorically linking arms and staring ahead with their chins up. Freshman year is characterized by the three of them joining their respective clubs and teams—Armin, ROV and Science Club; Eren, Diversity Club and the baseball team; Mikasa, volleyball and track. As a result, their codependency wanes a bit, but they remain tight-knit.

Eren and Mikasa, and sometimes even Eren's father, start going to therapy. To their slight surprise, it helps. They have both joint and separate sessions. Eren's father's episodes become less frequent, and Eren learns how to cope with his anger. Mikasa even starts coming out of her shell somewhat, although she claims Armin and Eren helped more than the therapy. The practice they go to is run by a husband-husband team of Erwin and Levi Smith-Ackerman, and Levi is the one with the youth therapy experience, so Eren spends two hours a week, one on Wednesday and one on Saturday, sitting across from Levi and pouring out his problems. Levi is quiet, and easy to talk to, if a bit brash if he perceives you as being rude or ignorant. Eren likes him.

A few other things that happen freshman year: Jean gets an undercut and grows six inches within two months, Armin and a sophomore named Annie start dating, Eren starts finding himself staring at boys.

Boys in general, but also one specific boy.

Jean, whom is certainly no longer the pinch-faced boy who hid behind his mother that day they met.

His predictions have come true, and Jean is turning out to be quite attractive. He goes away with his mother and his mother's new boyfriend for the two weeks before school starts up, and when he comes back his skin is three shades darker and his hair a much lighter shade of blond on top from the sun. The tan lasts for about three weeks and the hair color never really fades, leading Eren to believe that Jean appreciated the new aesthetic and started bleaching it on top. It's not something that everyone could pull off, but Jean does it effortlessly. He also starts attending Diversity Club, and teaches all of them little tidbits of French. He dates a girl named Sasha for a little while, but that ends without drama and Sasha as well as her life-long friend Connie are incorporated into what's becoming quite a big group, with the induction of Annie, Annie's brother Reiner, and Annie's brother Reiner's best friend Bert.

Eren never really expected to have so many friends when he moved to this city, this state, four years ago.

* * *

"Can I…tell you something?" Eren mumbles, one starry night while he and Mikasa are rocking back and forth on the porch swing by the zucchinis. Last Sunday was his fifteenth birthday.

"Of course," Mikasa replies. She has her knees drawn up, her elbows braced on them. A cricket chirps from very nearby. Jean's cat jumps into his window with a trill, and presses her face against the screen. She's big and orange and affectionate, and when Jean lets her out she likes to take naps under the large leaves of the zucchini plants.

"You can't tell Dad," Eren says.

"I won't," Mikasa says, "but I can't help you if you don't tell me what's going on."

He takes a deep breath, rings his hands out, and lets the confession go quickly and all in one breath, words forced out of his mouth over a sigh, "I-think-I'm-gay," practically all one word.

Mikasa sits there for a minute, quite still. Then she bobs her head, up-down-up-down, and as the swing sways just slightly from the movement says, "Okay. Alright."

"Only it's really not though, is it?" Eren mumbles. Mikasa doesn't say anything, but Eren is unsure if that means she agrees or is thinking. He says, "Dad will be disappointed."

"No he won't." This Mikasa says with utmost confidence, and when Eren glances at her in surprise, she wears no smile but her face is gentle. Determined, somehow, but gentle. "He'll just be glad that you're safe and happy and healthy. Maybe if your mom hadn't died, he'd be…well, there's no use in thinking about uncertainties. After everything you've been through, gay is definitely not the worst thing you could have turned out as."

Eren sighs, "It's not the best thing though, either. I'm pretty sure my dad didn't look at me when I was born and daydream about walking  _me_  down the aisle."

Mikasa shifts uneasily. "Probably not. But don't think about it like that. That's unfair to yourself, and it's unfair to others like you. If you keep thinking like that, you'll never be able to accept yourself. Accepting yourself is the first road to happiness. I know it can be hard, but…just…let what happens happen. And tell Dad."

"You won't…?"

"No, I promised I wouldn't," Mikasa says, "but that doesn't mean I can't tell  _you_  to tell him. Not right away, but…at some point." She gets up, and goes into the house. Eren sits there alone until the sun goes down and the wind picks up. When he happens to glance into Jean's window again, Jean's cat is gone, replaced by Jean himself.

Uneasily, Eren calls, "How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough," Jean replies. Lifts up the screen and leans out the window. "You two talk really loudly for people trying to keep secrets."

He knows he shouldn't, but Eren's paranoia and over defensive instincts get the best of him. Face reddening, he stands up and through gritted teeth says, "So what. Now you know. What are you going to do, call me a faggot? Tell everyone?"

Jean gets this sour, disgusted look on his face. He leans over the windowsill, almost like he's trying to get right in Eren's face from ten feet up and ten feet over, and snaps, "No! For God's sake, Eren, who do you think I am? I might not like you all that much, but I don't give a fuck that 'you think you're gay,' whatever that means." When Eren frantically shushes him, Jean shrinks back a little, mollified. "Sorry. But that was an assholish thing to say, man; even for you." Eren looks down, sighs roughly. Jean adds, "So, none of this 'I think' stuff. Are you or aren't you?"

"I don't  _know_ ," Eren mutters. "I mean, I like…guys…" Last night, he had a dream wherein someone with Jean's hair and eyes kissed him deeply, laid down next to him and pressed a warm hand to his flank. He's still confused by it.

"I think you need to get yourself figured out a bit," Jean says, not without gentleness, "and then listen to your sister, and tell your dad." He stands there for a second, and Eren senses he's left something unsaid, so he doesn't leave either. Jean's voice quietly floats down to him, saying, "There's a club. It meets on the first floor on Thursdays, room 104. You're welcome to come."

Eren nods, clears his throat, says, "Thanks."

* * *

Eren doesn't take Jean up on his offer until the beginning of sophomore year. The meeting room is a small, unused classroom that has no identifying features other than the number above the door. No sign posted outside like most classrooms do at this time of year,  _Meeting of the _ club immediately after school_. He figures it must be the kind of thing that spreads by word of mouth. That's certainly what it seems like when he walks in, finds Jean sitting with a small group of people, some he's familiar with and some he really isn't, and is asked, "Can we help you?" by a boy with brown hair and freckles, who seems to be leading the group.

"He's cool, Marco," Jean says, from next to the boy, this Marco, "he's with me."

"Oh!" Marco says, and breaks out into a large, friendly smile. Not that he was decidedly unfriendly before—just cautious. "Welcome! You didn't tell me you had someone to introduce to the group, Jean."

Rolling his eyes, Jean mutters, "It's not like that," and pats the chair next to his own. Eren cross the room to sit, and listens to Jean add, "He's my next-door neighbor. We've known each other since, like, fifth grade. Oh, and we play on the baseball team together. So. Wipe that look off your face, man."

Eren sits down and glances around the room. Annie's brother Reiner and his friend Bert are here, as well as a senior he recognizes from his science classes, and from the explosions that seem to center from them every class period. Along with them are two girls he doesn't recognize at all.

"I'm Marco," says the brown-haired leader, someone unnecessarily. "I'm the president, or whatever. What's your name?"

"Eren," he replies, talking more to Marco than the rest of the group. As an after thought, he skims his gaze over the rest and adds, "Jaeger. Eren Jaeger."

"Did Jean tell you about the club?" Marco asks, and glance at Jean as though he's familiar with Jean's penchant for vagueness.

With a shift of his shoulders, Eren replies, "Not really. He sort of mentioned it to me last spring, and I didn't really…think about coming until now."

"What made you decide to come this year?" Marco asks, and Eren has half a mind to demand why Marco has so many questions, but he seems like a nice guy, and the rest of the people gathered probably aren't bad people either. Even Jean is staring at him curiously. He has that post-summer tan again.

"I suppose that…" Eren sighs, shrugs again. "I've been doing a lot of self-examining, and I've come to the conclusion that…over the summer, I've realized I'm gay. And I suppose I could use some help coming to terms with that."

"Well," Marco says, with that benevolent smile still firmly in place. Strangely enough, Eren knows without a doubt that it's genuine, even though he's rarely ever seem someone smile so kindly at a stranger as Marco is looking at him. "I suppose that, in that case, all you need to know about the club is that we can help you with that." Looking back at his assembly, Marco adds, "So since we have a few new members, let's all introduce ourselves. I'm Marco, I'm a junior, I'm ace…"

They go around the circle, and Eren is introduced to everyone (Bert, gay; Reiner, pan; Hanji, agender; Ymir, gay; Christa, demisexual) and, eventually, the rotation does come back around to Jean. He looks right at Eren and says, "I'm Jean, I'm a sophomore, I'm bi."

Although he should have really been expecting it, Eren's world tilts vaguely sideways.

* * *

Sophomore year comes and goes without remark. Eren turns sixteen and continues having strange dreams where he and the boy next door get into increasingly compromising situations. He comes out to his father and, after being very quiet for a few days, is told that he will be supported no matter what. He cries. So does his dad, just a bit. Eren has his mother's face, and he thinks this is definitely one of the times that his father looks at him and sees his mother.

"So, everyone is saying you have a thing for Mikasa."

The party has worn down. Jean's seventeenth birthday party was thrown in his back yard and was widely attended both by people from school and by Jean's eccentric extended family. Eren hasn't understood more than two sentences at a time the entire night, as everyone yells over one another in French. Now they're hiding behind the zucchini, which is not as easy to do as it is in late summer, but it's dark, which helps.

Jean scoffs. "Since when do you listen to gossip?"

Eren shrugs. "It's hard not to when everyone keeps asking me if I'm gonna beat you up for liking my sister." His and Jean's rivalry has cooled down substantially, into a somewhat pragmatic friendship. It's unlikely at this point that they will come to blows, at least in earnest. They still get into scuffles sometimes, but about silly things, and they laugh through them. Eren finds them to be a guilty pleasure. He likes it too much when Jean touches him.

Another scoff. Jean starts twisting a zucchini and Eren slaps his hand away before he causes it to break off prematurely.

"Where do they even get this shit…?" Jean mutters, sitting on his hands.

"Dunno. But these things aren't hard to start. Rumors go flying if you just look at someone too long." Which makes him wonder why shit about him hasn't started floating around. He figures it's because they think Eren's mooning gazes are more like vengeful glares. Eren has always known that his resting expression can be described as, in a word, murderous.

"I used to look at her a lot back in, like, sixth grade," Jean mutters, "but that was when we were eleven. I thought she had pretty hair."

Eren sighs and slumps further down the wall. To Jean, he mumbles, "So do you like  _anyone_?"

"Do you?" Jean replies, instead of actually answering.

He's not sure what makes him, but Eren replies, "…Yeah." He doesn't elaborate, and Jean doesn't seem inclined to make him. He relaxes after a moment. Someone from the party calls Jean's name, bracketed on both sides by something in French that Eren doesn't understand but Jean does, if the way he rolls his eyes is any indication.

"If would be okay," Eren says slowly, after thinking about it for a long time. "If you had a thing for my sister. I'd rather she date you than…" he doesn't finish the sentence, letting Jean infer for himself what he means. He's not even entirely certain what he means, although he thinks it's something like  _than someone I don't know, can't trust_.

"I appreciate it," Jean says, "but I really don't."

"Why?" Eren mutters. "There something wrong with her?"

"No! Christ, Eren, don't put words in my mouth." Jean huffs a looks away. "There's nothing  _wrong_  with her, she's just not the one I like."

"Then who do you like?"

Jean rolls his shoulders. "Who do you like?"

"Why do you always have to turn things around on me?" Eren demands. "Why can't you answer a question for once? I'm tired of telling you things and never getting any answers back in return. Just once, I'd like you to  _tell the truth_  when I ask you something. Just once."

"Fine!" Jean yells. They're definitely going to be discovered at this rate. "Ask me something! Ask me anything. Whatever it is, I'll answer it honestly."

"Fine," Eren hisses. He and Jean glare at each other from two inches away, silent aside from their furious breathing. Eren frantically considers what he wants to ask, something that matters so he doesn't waste this one question that Jean will actually answer outright. Slowly, thought still forming, he says, "Do you like me? Even as just a friend?"

"Yes," Jean says slowly. He doesn't sound like he's breathing anymore.

"…As more than a friend?"

"Yes," Jean whispers.

"Oh," Eren breathes. "I see."

Jean kisses him. They lay down and press their mouths together, graze their teeth over necks and earlobes, lick each other's lips under the canopy of zucchini leaves.

The summer after Eren turns eighteen, he and Jean move away from the place where their parents brought them for a better life somewhere safe. They dump all of their things into an apartment in Boston and spend the summer driving. To Quebec to visit Jean's father's grave, and then across country to stand on the sidewalk in front of the empty lot where the house that Eren's mother died in used to stand.

Eren drops a picture onto the empty lot as they stand there, leaves it for the ghosts as he and Jean walk back to the car.

The photograph (Eren and Mikasa sitting on the railing of the Vermont house with their graduation gowns on and tassels on the left side, Armin and Jean behind them, Jean with his chin hooked over Eren's shoulder, their father and Jean's mother standing amid the zucchini) flaps in the wind, but doesn't blow away.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt 'Zucchini AU'--whatever that means. Originally posted on Tumblr about a month and a half ago under the same title, on the blog imagineerejean. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
